and other Obama officials who were in-
volved in the talks insist that the G. O.P.
caucus in the House is not as monolithi-
cally opposed to a deal as one might
think. Last year's talks taught the White
House that there are divisions between
the hard-right Tea Party faction that is
unilaterally opposed to any tax hikes and
more traditional Republicans who are so
concerned about the long-term deficit
that under some circumstances they
would vote for higher taxes. Plouffe said
that the key will be whether Boehner is
prepared to alienate the Tea Party bloc.
"All the paperwork's done!" he said.
'We know what the options are. It's all
been done! It's not like they're starting
from scratch."
Over in the Senate, there is a hint that
the ice could thaw if Obama wins. Sev-
eral senators from both parties have
begun to meet behind closed doors to ad-
dress the looming fiscal crisis, with the
aim of delivering a tax-and-budget pack-
age by September. "Everyone is kind of
holding their cards, because we realize
that it's not game time yet," the T ennes-
see Republican Bob Corker told Politico
last week. In late May, Mitch McCon-
nell, an architect of the G.O.P. strategy
of non -coöperation since 2009, also told
Politico, "I think we have plenty of mem-
bers in the Senate on both sides of the
aisle who :fiilly understand that we weren't
sent here just to make a point-that we
were sent here to make a difference."
Several White House officials I talked
to made it clear that if a deal, or at least
the framework for a deal, is not reached
before December 31st Obama would
allow all the Bush tax cuts to expire-a
tactic that would achieve huge deficit re-
duction, but in a particularly painful and
ill-conceived fashion. The Administra-
tion is preparing for that outcome, and
Republicans may not be willing to budge
without the threat of this cataclysm.
Plouffe said, "I think were going to have
the ability to tell the American people,
'Hey, your taxes may go up on January 1st
because these guys refuse to ask the
wealthy to do anything. Hey, there are
going to be cuts in spending that aren't
done as smartly as they could because
these guys won't agree to ask anything
from the wealthy.' "
The White House believes that Obama
needs to change the psychology of the
congressional Republicans and that, ifhis
reëlection won't do it, perhaps T axmaged-
don will. ''To get anything done in the sec-
ond term," another White House official
said, "the President has to convince the
Republican Party that obstructionism is a
losing strategy."
v
I ncreasingly, hints of Obamà s second-
term vision are becoming evident on
the campaign trail. On June 1st, Obama
spoke before a luncheon crowd at a farm-
to-table restaurant in a converted ware-
house in the North Loop of Minneapolis,
just yards from the Mississippi River. The
restaurant, the Bachelor Farmer, is owned
by two sons of the Minnesota governor,
Mark Dayton. They had designed a spe-
cial menu, which highlighted fresh pro-
duce grown on the restaurant's roof: and
the staff wore matching ties made to com-
memorate the President's visit. A hundred
people who each gave five thousand dol-
lars to the President's campaign dined on
a salad of house-smoked pork and a
choice of roasted chicken or Copper River
sockeye salmon (a vegetarian menu was
also available), as Obama spoke about the
politics of his potential second term.
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He noted, as he does with some fre-
quency these days, that his original vision
of a bipartisan Washington was a mirage.
"My hope, when I came into office, was
that we would have Republicans and
Democrats coming together because the
nation was facing extraordinary chal-
lenges," he said. "It turns out that wasn't
their approach-to put it mildly." He in-
sisted that the G. O.P. had moved too far
to the right to make bipartisanship possi-
ble. He and John McCain had agreed on
issues like immigration, climate change,
and campaign finance. "The center of
gravity for their party has shifted."
But maybe, Obama said, his reëlection
would halt that trend. "I believe that if
we're successful in this election-when
were successful in this election-that the
fever may break," he said, "because there s
a tradition in the Republican Party of
more common sense than that." He noted
a few areas of possible compromise: deficit
reduction, a highway bill, immigration,
and energy policy. He repeated the phrase
that is becoming a mantra for his cam-
paign: "If we can break this fever."
If President Obama can indeed guide
the parties toward an agreement that
puts the federal government on a sustain-
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''If you have any mental-health issues you'd like to
discuss, now would be a good time. "